"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).

Sunday, January 31, 2016

Sunday Morning

Gathered Leaves from the Prose of Mary E. Coleridge, with a Memoir by Edith Sichel (London: Constable and Company Ltd., 1910), p. 222 (June 3, 1888; ellipsis in original; Anodos was a pseudonym of the author):

Anodos had in his early youth a great liking for
sermons. Not that he ever understood or remembered
them, but the taste of them was sweet to his palate.
It is not so now. He left Church this morning especially
to avoid one. Outside the birds held Morningsong, and
the wind that bloweth where it listeth preached out of
St. John's Gospel, 'Thou canst not tell whence it
cometh.' It might have been crisping the waves,
ruffling the heather, scattering the powdery snow upon
some distant Alp, before it folded its great wings, and
fluttered peacefully down into that London Churchyard.
....
I incline to think that it is not three people who
make a congregation, but one. Alone, I am a host in
myself; oppressed on every side by masses of yawning
fellow-Christians, how can I be devout? (I am not.)
Even if they are not yawning, what is the feverish
excitement of a crowd hanging on the rhetoric of the
local Vicar to the quiet Apocalypse of a solitary person
under the sky among trees? 'The heavens declare the
glory of God: and the firmament showeth His handiwork.' After all, even a Cathedral declares the glory
of Man.